Chris Smither: Leave The Light On (Shock)

Chris Smither: Cold Trail Blues

Smith is a grizzled-sounding roots-country singer whose spare songs glisten with his guitar playing, and whose baritone sounds whiskey-cured and filled with gravitas.

He's no chicken (he's 62 and recorded his first album 33 years ago), but that only adds to his authentic, throaty country-blues which owes debts to Mississippi John Hurt, but also respects more recent songwriters. (He covers Dylan's Visions of Johanna --as a waltz -- and Peter Case's Cold Trail Blues here).

He's a fine writer himself and pens lyrics which can be hard and bone dry, or often quite witty.

He's the only singer-songwriter I know of who has worked "paramecium" into a foot tapping lyric.
Respected by like of Bonnie Raitt, Smither is a diamond.

Related Articles

The murky photo of a small, barroom audience on the inner sleeve of this brittle and typically dark album by singer-poet McMurtry might have included me.
It looks like it was taken in the... > Read more

Tom Waits' influence crops up in unexpected places.
After his superbly titled Wrong-Eyed Jesus, the man who goes by the unmemorable nom de disque Jim White comes back for a second album of dark... > Read more

Another installment in the on-going LNT
series, this compiled by Danish electronica artist Trentemoller who
opts for a dark, almost suffocating and disturbing evening at home by
many less... > Read more

The late Murray McNabb was proud of these recordings (despite the financial cost) done in New York in 1990 and, in an interview just a month before his death he mentioned them as a high point in a... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

So just how pervasive was Bruce Springsteen's influence? One listen to this track by the short-lived Funky Kings from LA would suggest that even by his second album he'd managed to infiltrate the... > Read more